The Center for the Study of the Force Majeure
Written by Josh Harrison (representing the Center for the Study of the Force Majeure)
Could you briefly explain the driving force/motivation behind your work?
Our global motivation is to find ways to help return the world to ecological (and social) balance and to give back more to the life web than we take. Our mission statement highlights our challenge.
"We are not apart from nature; we are a part of nature. This is a central paradox of modern life. Our challenge as artists, scientists, activists, and humans is to bring us back into the system we are only a part of.”
We build on 50 years of work by pioneering ecological artists Newton and Helen Harrison, adapting their methods of finding creative and enduring systemic solutions to complex ecological challenges. We develop ideas and seed concepts regarding climate change and the life web
Please talk a bit about the process of your work.
How big is here? How Long is now?
We address complex issues by bringing together broad expertise: scientific, cultural, historical, and ecological. That typically means establishing relationships with local knowledge: scientists, artists, planners and others engaged with the particular challenge.
We follow a simple process:
Provocation – we identify challenges generated by climate stress and tensions that exist between where we are and where we need to be.
Interaction – we turn those provocations into public conversations and transformational solutions.
Implementation – we implement solutions by creating and supporting public and private projects that restore environmental balance in ways large and small.
We look at what we’re doing as an approach to systems solving, moving away from what you might describe as “desire-based” solutions toward a process that begins by accepting complexity and the need to engage with multiple perspectives and to ignore artificial barriers whether political, administrative, or academic. Nature recognizes ecotones and bioregions as boundary conditions, so should we. As a core part of our work we use tools of artistic expression (collage, montage, perspective shift, poetry, and above all metaphor) to challenge institutionalized ways of thinking about problems.
Where/How has your work engaged with systems or transformative change-making?
Part of the essential nature of our work has been influencing what we call “Conversational Drift” that is finding ways to challenge and influence public understanding around a major issue towards a more regenerative end. Historically it has worked in a number of ways, sometimes quite directly, sometimes in less clear but no less significant ways. Our goal of course as the climate crisis expands is to move more of our work into direct implementation. That said, let me share 2 historic and 1 current example:
1. In the 1970s Newton and Helen became the first people in history to grow crabs in a laboratory setting, becoming the first artists ever to be awarded a Seagrant from Scripps Institute of Oceanography - this came out of an intuition and a question: “what makes a crab happy? Because a happy Crab will want to reproduce” and the second insight that mating season happens during the monsoons. The research question that is clearly obvious in retrospect became “What happens when you create an artificial monsoon in a laboratory?” That discovery enabled global decapod aquaculture systems to evolve.
2. In the 1990s, Newton and Helen were invited to the province of Holland to help resolve a crisis over land development that had stymied the traditional Dutch political process to the point they were willing to ask crazy environmental artists to come in and help. It’s a complicated story but in brief, they pulled together a team of local experts and soon realized that the development process was backward. Symbolically, they went to a major planning meeting and drew red X’s over the current stalemated designs and showed how a different strategy could save millions of acres of farm and parkland, the symbolic “green heart” of Holland from being paved over. The plan was adopted and transformed into the environmental master plan of the province.
3. In 2015 we started working to better understand the Fire Crisis in CA and the western US. Again a very complicated story, fire has been a continuous feature of the Western landscape since the last ice age. For millennia, indigenous peoples managed fire risk using techniques informed by an intimate relationship with their environment, embracing fire as beneficial. A century (more in California) of extractive land practices and suppression of indigenous fire management has left CA with massively overgrown forests and in turn, generated the catastrophic fires that have emerged over the past decade. Working with a broad range of foresters, ecologists, tribal members, and others we developed a series of strategies to shift our mindset about how we in the US treat fire and the landscape. As part of this evolution, we spent some time presenting our thinking to the then-governor of the state who was not interested in exploring any strategy that did not generate profits in sizable amounts. That said, current CA state policy and strategies (not necessarily actions) have adopted a significant number of our suggestions.